134 E LECTION or no election, one of the important books of our genera- tion bears the title "Hearings Before the Committee on Un-American Ac- tivities, House of Represen tatives, Eightieth Congress, Second Session: Hearings Regarding Communist Es- pionage in the United States Govern- ment" (United States Government Printing Office, \Vashington, 1 948; 878 pages, numbered from 501 to 1,378; $1.75). Covering the period from July 31 st to September 9th, it has been printed in an edition of only a thou- sand copies, for the use of the members of the Committee whose deliberations it records, newspaper correspondents, and others with a special interest in the pro- ceedings, such as, presumably, the two witnesses who are now suing two other witnesses for libelling or slandering them on the radio. There is not a per- son in the country, however, who, con- sciously or otherwise, has not a special interest in the record of these hearings, and a first edition of a million copies would have seemed to me moderate, since this record gives the story of the Committee's hearings a continuity, and th us a shape, that news- paper presentations of isolated tidbits from day to day almost complete- ly failed to convey. Per- haps some book club might still be induced d " H . " to sen out earlngs in place of the cus- tomary historico-mam- mary bargain offering. The text is bulky enough for a book-club selec- tion, and in a dust jacket featuring a W orld- T el- , e gram reporter s con- cept of a beautiful blond spy, it might well be ac- ceptable to a high pro- portion of subscribers. Certainly none who be- gan reading it would send it back, for it is a book difficult to lay down, a sequence of dramas that are Shake- . I II 1111 11 Q Ilr""11 1 [ - - -=- D') Cö<ô(O - - -- BOOKS The W hole Story spearean except for the poverty of the idiom. In this Shakespeare, however, the Shallows and Dogberrys are the protagonists; other characters appear only transiently, leaving the drolls to apostrophize each other. In recognitiQn of the preponderant parts they play, the book bears on its flyleaf a roster of the nine Committeemen and of the two principal investigators, like a Dramatis Personae. The witnesses are listed later, like Lords and Ladies of the Court, or Citizens of Verona. Two of the nine featured players, Congressmen John McDowell, Republican, of Pennsylva- nia, and Richard B. Vail, Republican, of Illinois, have since been withdrawn from the cast by the decision of their constituents, who voted them out of office. Mr. McDowell, at least, will be hard to replace. "Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee," says Mr. McDowell, in the record, in a tribute to Miss Eliza- beth Bentley, the initial witness, "here is an American citizen who delved into this business and no\v has the courage to walk through the valley of the shadow of publicity." (lit the time this statement was made, photographs of the beaming Miss Bentley had appeared on the front page of nearly every newspaper in the nation. In them, she seemed happ) to escape from what Mr. McDowell would probably call the glare of obscurity.) -=---='"" =-- - Mr. Fred E. Busbey, Republican, of Illinois (another election casualty), tes- . f . " N tl Ylng as a guest expert, says, ow, anybody that knows anything about the Spanish situation knows that the Loyal- ists in Spain and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade were definitely one-hundred- per-cent Communist outfits." Mr. Rob- ert E. Stripling, the chief investigator, says to Alger Hiss, a witness, "You are an intelligent person and not naïve enough that you wouldn't know a Com- munist if you saw one." (This simple visual teSt for political belief may well prove invaluable to future poll takers.) The lamented Mr. Vail says, "In the interest of the accuracy of the record. . . the picture to which I refer was a picture of Karl Marx instead of Joe Stalin." Mr. F. Edward Hébert, States' Rights Democrat, of Louisiana, says, "It is in- teresting to note that every time \ve talk about Communism we hear about Columbia University... and I think General Eisenhower has a big thing to do to clean that place up." Mr. John E. Rankin, States' Rights Democrat, of Mississippi, is one of the first mem- bers of the cast to establish his character in the mind of the reader. He says to Miss Bentley, in extracting from the shadow-walker an anatomy of Com- munism, "In other words, it is nothing but a system of abject slavery, domi- nated by a racial minority that has \ Jl . . na....